Secrets

Tue Holmgaard (b. 1971) and Marianne Vesterled (b. 1975), the Danish artists known as Vestholm, demonstrate the creative, artistic and intellectual possibilities to be found in partnership, trust and love. Coming to each other in mid-life, their meeting, through their work in communications and design, unleashed an intimacy where abiding passions that had largely lain dormant came tumbling forth from each of them. Their creative and personal obsessions meshed and took on a singular voice. Their work, from its outset, has always been about putting their whole individual selves in service to a common visual language about fantasy, the transgressive, and to investigating ethical and social convention.

Both had come from relatively uncomplicated middle-class upbringings in the suburbs of the island city of Odense - the third-largest city in Denmark. Tue growing up had encountered books such as John Cleland's classic Fanny Hill and works by the mysterious French fetish artist, known only as 'Carlo'. These underpinnings of his erotic imagination were a well spring waiting to be tapped. As a child and young girl, Marianne dressed up, donned wigs and hats, vintage shoes, dresses, fur, and experimented with make-up and gender roles. Role playing, character and scenario building were the constant of her childhood 'games'.Their mutual interest in the complex terrains of passion was established when, in an early encounter, Marianne mentioned that the kitchen scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice was perhaps her earliest and certainly her most erotic film memory. A mutual sensibility about a set of important issues that are too infrequently spoken of, and even less frequently shared, was communicated between them. It was from that seed, rooted in cinematic pleasure, that a relationship bloomed that would allow them to create a partnership where no feeling or thought is taboo and where everything can be ventured or expressed. John Hirschfeld is the nom de plume of an oxymoronically described adventurous American. He has immersed himself in art, eroticism and aggressive doubt for six decades. His life's work can best be understood as trying to tell people things they don't want to hear in a way that they can hear it.